http://www.itstartshear.com/ starts TODAY

Monday, February 20th, 2012

The album that’s a website, the website that’s an album: Peter Broderick’s http://www.itstartshear.com/is released today, and the accompanying website is live from now. Explore the website to watch videos, see photos and learn more about the individual tracks.

The Oregon musician follows two must-have albums, Home (2008) and How They Are (2010), with another that will no doubt receive similarly rapturous reviews — whose enthusiasm will do nothing to bring Broderick to the wider audience he deserves. This may suit him, as he is reportedly reclusive and introspective, but it is scandalous, so beautiful and original is the music he makes. The man who, on How They Are, sang a song from the perspective of a battery chicken (and, in the process, created one of that year’s most moving songs), here uses the domain-name title track as an exploration of intimacy, anonymity, alienation, the personal and the impersonal — its starting point the isolating side of online interaction — to a hypnotic guitar figure and beat, giving way to a chanted delivery of the title that is both alluring and utterly bleak. Minimalism and pointillism are used in a way that makes the sudden interjection of, say, strings absolutely breathtaking. Blue is Broderick’s version of a song written by his then teenage father, which he found on an old tape and has lovingly restored, Broderick’s reverbed voice intoning his father’s words. Trespassing honours another bird, in this case one the musician ran over on a country road. Again, detailing is everything: a simple strummed guitar pattern beneath Broderick’s plaintive singing. Truly exceptional. – DC